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Growing Strange
Growing Strange isn’t your average “mental health” podcast — unless you consider laughing at your own chaos a form of growth (in which case, welcome home). Hosted by July Kind, a millennial navigating motherhood, partnership, womanhood, and late-night YouTube spirals, this show mixes sharp, funny observations with honest confessions about what it means to be an adult who still doesn’t quite feel like one.
Think comedy with teeth, diary with detours, and perspective shifts disguised as punchlines. Each episode serves up cultural commentary, raw honesty, and the occasional existential side quest — perfect for anyone who’s tired of polished “wellness talk” and just wants something real, weird, and real weird (in a comforting way).
Growing Strange
Welcome to the Spiral (or Why We Should Cancel Self-Help)
Ever feel like you're stuck in the same emotional patterns, cycling through the same challenges no matter how hard you try to move forward? You're not broken or failing—you're spiraling.
In this episode, we explore how our lives move in spirals rather than straight lines, and why tracking your "inner weather" can transform your relationship with emotions.
Psychology Citations
UCLA Research on Affect Labeling: Lieberman, M. D., et al. (2007). "Putting feelings into words: affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli." Psychological Science, 18(5), 421-428.
Emotion Differentiation Research: Barrett, L. F., et al. (2001). "Knowing what you're feeling and knowing what to do about it: Mapping the relation between emotion differentiation and emotion regulation." Cognition and Emotion, 15(6), 713-724.
Hedonic Adaptation: Brickman, P., & Campbell, D. T. (1971). "Hedonic relativism and planning the good society." In M. H. Appley (Ed.), Adaptation-level theory (pp. 287-305). Academic Press.
ACT Therapy/Defusion: Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., & Wilson, K. G. (2011). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change. Guilford Press.
Stages of Change Model: Prochaska, J. O., & DiClemente, C. C. (1983). "Stages and processes of self-change of smoking: Toward an integrative model of change." Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 51(3), 390-395.
Philosophical Citations
Eliade, M. (1959). The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Jung, C. G. (1969). The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Princeton University Press.
Heraclitus, Fragments(DK22 B30, B91).
Pop Culture References
Russian Doll (Netflix, 2019)
Wristcutters: A Love Story (2006) - Tom Waits
Billie Eilish songs
Music by helkimer on Pixabay
Welcome. This is Growing Strange. I'm July Kind and you pressed play, which either means you're very curious, feeling a little lost, or just bored at work, and, honestly, all three are a vibe. Bored at work and, honestly, all three are a vibe. I want to start off saying that this is not where you're going to find 10 steps to optimize your mornings before sunrise. I'm not going to tell you to drink mushroom coffee unless you think it's tasty, or buy a special journal unless you have an obsession with notebooks like I do. If anything, I'm kind of the opposite of that. I'm here because I'm messy. I'm a messy human being who has been building ways to help make sense of my own life, and somehow it actually works, for me at least, and so I thought maybe I could also help you or somebody. If it makes one person feel even a little bit more fulfilled, then it will have been worth it. But it's basically like putting glitter glue on taxes Practical, chaotic, but surprisingly effective.
Speaker 1:Now, before we get any deeper, I just want to talk about the self-help industrial complex, big self-help, you know. It's this vibe where someone tells you you're broken or something about you is broken, and then they sell you something to fix it, and the fixes can range from a workbook to a $1,200 retreat to a six-week cleanse. The whole industry thrives on telling you you're not enough as you are, and I am calling major BS, because you are enough as you are right now, even with your hair not having been washed in a few days, even with that single pickle in your refrigerator floating in juice that has now somehow become sentient, and especially if your search history would confuse, alarm or impress a small-town librarian. You are enough, but being enough and feeling enough is different. We're always growing, always developing and shifting, and we're all strange. See what I did there Tidal drop Very smooth. Let me play you something real quick. Here's Tom Waits in the film Wrist Cutters A Love Story Film Wrist Cutters A Love.
Speaker 2:Story. Once upon a time there was a crooked tree and a straight tree and they grew next to each other. And every day the straight tree would look at the crooked tree and he would say You're crooked, you've always been crooked and you'll continue to be crooked. But look at me, look at me, said the straight tree. He said I'm tall and I'm straight. And then one day the lumberjacks came into the forest and looked around and the manager in charge said cut all the straight trees. And that crooked tree is still there to this day, growing strong and growing strange.
Speaker 1:That's the inspiration for this podcast, this ancient parable retold by a gravelly voice blues singer. This is how my mind works, through references and fun facts. What I'm offering isn't a fix, because we're not broken, all right. It's more like a frame, a way of looking at your life that makes you go oh, maybe I'm just in a new chapter, maybe this mess has a shape to it, maybe chaos is just growth, lit from a different angle. Think of of those TikTok cleaning videos, the ones where someone takes a sponge and just erases a mysterious brown stain from a sink and suddenly the comments are like oh my gosh, this is porn for my nervous system. That's what I want for your brain, not perfection, but that sigh of relief when something starts to make sense. And listen, I get that. Podcasts are like buttholes. Okay, everyone has one and we're all just wondering if we should bleach ours out of existence. Just pretend like I'm a barely invasive ghost, or like the friend who's somehow always at your kitchen counter drinking your Pamplemousse LaCroix and making you laugh while you're doing the dishes.
Speaker 1:We are going to be mapping these weird little cycles. We go through the dips, the highs, the stuck places, the breakthroughs. It's not science, but it's also not not science. There's going to be psychology, philosophy, pop culture, ancient wisdom, a veritable cornucopia of information packaged for squiggly little brains like my own, because I think learning or growing, or whatever we want to call it, sticks better when it's actually applicable. My sister just sent me this quote the other day Knowledge is only a rumor until it lives in the muscle. It's been attributed to the asaro tribe in papua new guinea, though, like a lot of indigenous wisdom that ends up circulating online. The exact source is hard to verify, but it doesn't make it any less true. Think about how we learn as kids, or how the kids in your life learn. Now you can show them the word apple on a flashcard, have them color a picture of an apple, even play with like pretend apples in a kitchen set. But until they hold one apples in a kitchen set, but until they hold one, feel that weight, the smooth skin, the way it smells and they take that first crisp bite and taste the sweetness, they don't really know apple, they just know about apples.
Speaker 1:Okay, tangent completed, let's get into what we're talking about today. Yes, I've been talking this long and haven't even nicked the tip of the topic. In this episode. There's this little perspective tweak that can keep us from drowning in our own brain soup. It's not a hack or trick. It's more like a reminder that you don't have to white knuckle your way through life. You can actually unclench your jaw, roll your shoulders and start to see things a little differently and hopefully, once you've heard it, learned it, you won't be able to unlearn it, like once someone points out that Mario has a mustache but no upper lip.
Speaker 1:I started noticing in my own mess that I kept circling through the same stages Different jobs, different relationships, different bangs but the shape of the experience was the same. There is hope, there is effort, inevitably disappointment and then a breakthrough from that disappointment, usually through rest or a pause of some sort, and then repeat. It's like realizing that all the B-plots are the same. In 90s sitcoms Life has a B-plot. Same. In 90s sitcoms Life has a B-plot.
Speaker 1:Years ago I had gotten this big responsibilities job and I thought I'm an adult. Now I'm practically Miranda Priestly. Day one the office smelled like a reheated Hot Pocket. My boss was a person perfectly comfortable speaking poorly about women or really anyone who felt different from who they were. My biggest accomplishment was getting really good at circling back and at first I thought that I was the problem, because I always think that I'm the problem. But I realized it wasn't the first time, not even the second or third. It was a different job, but the same circumstance. So then my notes app became littered with what eventually would become my first pattern recognition Highs, lows, plateaus, repeating, not because I was failing and restarting, but because I was human.
Speaker 1:And that's when I started diving into all sorts of philosophies that were basically saying the same thing the impermanence in Buddhism, with all the rises and falls and shifts. The Stoics saying you are the story you tell yourself. Psychologists talking about cognitive reframing. How we label what's happening changes how we experience it. It really helped relieve that feeling of being trapped in a box, because life isn't linear, it's looping, it's spiraling.
Speaker 1:Our culture is obsessed with ladders, climbing the corporate ladder, leveling up, onward and upward. Even in spirituality, ascending, rising that higher vibration it's always up, up, up, which is hilarious because if you've ever actually climbed a ladder for more than 30 seconds, you know it's exhausting and terrifying, and nobody even looks hot on a ladder. Osha should do a whole campaign about that part. The ladder model says you start at the bottom. You work hard, you climb, rung by rung, and eventually you arrive. Except arrive where? At what? Happiness? Enlightenment Spoiler? People get there and they're still miserable. It's called hedonic adaptation. You get what you thought you wanted. It feels amazing for like a week and then your brain resets to baseline New rung, same emptiness, which is why the self-help industry keeps selling you a taller ladder.
Speaker 1:The spiral framework allows for revisiting and asks what's different this time. It leaves that space for noticing behaviors and evolving feelings, without needing those outward markers of progression. Needing those outward markers of progression. Spirals are baked into nature and myth because they actually reflect how life works. You circle back to the same themes, but not in the same ways.
Speaker 1:I need to pause because I just had the largest case of deja vu and when that happens, I don't I need. This is going to be my whole new deep dive, because what is deja vu? Even what's happening in your brain? When it happens to me, I just get that sense of I'm exactly where I need to be, like I felt this or I dreamt this or I saw this, and now it's happening. Anyways, what was I saying? Yes, you're circling back to the same themes, but not in the same way. You revisit grief, but from a new depth. You meet your anxiety again, but this time you've got tools. You return to joy. You return to joy, but with more appreciation.
Speaker 1:It's cyclical, but evolving. It's motion without the burnout of go up or die. And you can find this concept in a lot of places, turns out Historian of religions. Oh gosh, name pronunciation my downfall. Marcia Eliade. All right, romanian, I don't know if that's correct. Anyways, marcia Eliade wrote extensively about how sacred time is cyclical, not linear. Carl Jung built his entire approach around the idea that we spiral back to the same archetypal themes throughout our lives, each time with deeper integration. Even modern neuroscience shows that learning literally happens in spirals. We encode, forget, re-encounter and encode again at a deeper level. The spiral isn't just metaphor. It's how our brains, our bodies and the cosmos functions. Have you seen Russian Doll?
Speaker 1:Basically, natasha Leone's character, nadia, gets stuck in a time loop, dying and coming back to the same bathroom at the same party over and over again. And if you've ever seen or read or experienced any time loop stories, it goes pretty similarly. This one is just the bombcom at first. She's trying to solve it like a puzzle. You figure out the right sequence of actions to break free ie the ladder, thinking of solving, climbing out and never having to deal with it again. But as the show goes on spoiler alert she realizes it's not about escaping the loop. It's about what she learns each time. Each death and rebirth teaches her something new about herself, her relationships, her patterns. She keeps coming back to the same bathroom, but she's different each time. And it's true, highly stylized with banging dialogue, but very representative of our experiences.
Speaker 1:We don't have to climb out of our patterns. In fact, we shouldn't try to force instant and constant change, because we are already spiraling through them with increased awareness and skill. It's why our tastes change, why routines evolve, why media affects us differently every time we re-experience it. We just have to realize that. This is why cognitive behavioral therapy is so effective. Cbt it's about cycling through thought awareness again and again until new patterns stick. The stages of change is even represented as a spiral staircase. I will post a picture of it on the Instagram at growing strange podcast. Ladder thinking is exhausting because it demands constant upward motion. Spiral thinking is more sustainable because it honors those natural rhythms of growth and rest and return.
Speaker 1:One thing that has helped me keep this framework is noticing my inner weather is noticing my inner weather. When I'm anxious it feels permanent. When I'm sad, it feels like my whole identity. But correlating it to weather kind of assures me that it's temporary. See, your inner weather is the general atmospheric condition of your emotional and mental state right now, in that moment. It's not about diagnosing yourself or finding the perfect psychological term. It's about noticing the texture, the quality, the felt sense of what's happening inside. And weather has different elements, right Temperature, pressure systems, wind patterns, visibility. It's the same with your inner landscape. Maybe your thoughts feel scattered and gusty like wind. Maybe there's a heaviness in your chest. There's a heaviness in your chest like the low pressure before a storm. Or maybe everything feels bright and clear. Or it could be one of those gray days where you can't quite see what's ahead. And this isn't just like some feel-good metaphor.
Speaker 1:There's actual research backing this. There's actual research backing this. Ucla's Matthew Lieberman found that just naming emotions calms your amygdala, that ancient alarm system in your brain. They call it affect labeling. When you say I'm feeling stormy, your brain literally gets less activated than when you're just pushing through the storminess without naming it. There's also this research on something called emotion differentiation. The more specifically you can describe your emotional state, the better you cope with it. The better you cope with it. I'm stressed versus I'm feeling foggy with light panic. The second one actually gives your nervous system more information to work with and if you've ever done ACT therapy or ACT acceptance and commitment therapy or ACT acceptance and commitment therapy, they use this technique called diffusion, where you practice seeing feelings as experiences passing through you rather than as your identity. I'm having the thought that I'm anxious versus I am anxiety itself. So saying you're foggy with light panic is not really that silly, it's neuroscience.
Speaker 1:The Greek philosopher Heraclitus famously said you can't step in the same river twice because the water is constantly flowing and changing. No-transcript Anyways. Heraclitus believed everything is in flux. Pantere or something like that. Everything flows your emotional states, your thoughts, your inner weather, it's all river water. It looks like the same river from the outside, but the actual water touching your feet is completely different from moment to moment. That anxiety you felt today, different water than yesterday's anxiety, even if it feels identical.
Speaker 1:And Heraclitus would have loved Billie Eilish. I mean, she's basically a meteorologist of millennial discontent. When the party's over everything, I wanted freaking ocean eyes. She's not trying to fix the weather. She's reporting it from the inside, using the weather instead of ignoring it or, like me, sometimes fighting it. Because this is not about trying to change the weather. We're not doing sun dances to make the anxiety go away. We're not shaming ourselves for having storm clouds. We're just reading the forecast of our own inner landscape, which is kind of revolutionary in a world that demands constant sunshine. Self-help culture wants you to manifest permanent spring, but real ecosystems need winter, they need storms, they need those quiet days when nothing much is happening on the surface but tons of growth is happening underground happening underground.
Speaker 1:So right now or sometime today, notice your inner weather. Not a whole therapy session, not a new identity. Just what's the weather? Because it's just like learning about apples. I can tell you about it all day, but until you feel that shift from being caught in the storm to observing it, until it lives in your body, it's just a nice idea. So let's make this concrete.
Speaker 1:Weather has different elements, and so do you. There's temperature. Not just I need a cardigan stat, but are you feeling warm and cozy? Cold and distant? Maybe room temperature? Maybe there's a warmth in your chest when you think about the weekend or something, feels chilly and disconnected. Then there's pressure. Chilly and disconnected, then there's pressure. Is there heaviness in your chest, like that low pressure before a storm? Or maybe that light, buoyant feeling when everything seems possible, and sometimes it's just a consistent atmospheric pressure, not heavy, not light, just present and wind patterns.
Speaker 1:Your thoughts can be scattered in the wind. Maybe there's that steady breeze of productivity, or one of those days where your mind feels completely still. Then again there could also be like gusty irritation blowing everything around. Then there's visibility. Can you see clearly what's ahead, or is everything foggy and uncertain? Maybe it's a crystal clear day where you know exactly what you want. Know exactly what you want. Or maybe you're in the fog and can barely see two feet in front of you. Name it. That's your weather. Not forever, just today's forecast.
Speaker 1:Just naming these elements changes your relationship to them. It's like when you hear those weird sounds outside at night and you're immediately like that's clearly a serial killer. Right, your mind starts turning your life into a horror film. But if and when you peek out the window, it's just raccoons knocking over your trash cans or something you know. They're like using their little paws that are way too close to human hands, for my liking, by the way. Our minds want to turn every disturbance into some giant catastrophe, but you peel back the curtain and name what's actually happening. It's not a serial killer, it's just your anxiety raccoons. And let me tell you when those anxiety raccoons move in, they really make themselves at home.
Speaker 1:Last week I was pretty convinced that I was failing at everything. My youngest is in a co-op where my parent job is library manager. I sent a message about mounting a bookshelf because I didn't want it to crush any kids like that heinous Ikea dresser situation. Very reasonable request, I thought, but three days of no response and the raccoons had me questioning everything. They think you're incompetent. Any other moms would have just handled this. You're stupid for even keeping a tall shelf in there. What if a kid gets hurt? What if you're the mom who can't follow proper protocol? My inner weather was tornado warning, with scattered raccoons and a 100% chance of mom guilt. And that's exactly how I labeled it.
Speaker 1:I didn't try to figure out why I felt the way I felt or how to fix my feelings. I named it and put it aside. It didn't weigh on me. I actually just stopped thinking about it until I received the very chill response of go right ahead. See, a former version of myself would have tried to evict the raccoons immediately, set traps, call pest control, shame them for even existing control, shame them for even existing. But inside the spiral, I just observed and I was able to ask questions I never would have even thought about. Like I notice these anxiety raccoons show up when I'm around other parents who seem to have it all figured out. Why is that? Could it be a way of trying to protect myself from feeling judged or insecure? Possibly, probably. And when I asked those kinds of questions, the raccoons kind of seem sweet, even if their methods are a bit unhinged. But it led me to examining why a defense mechanism like that even exists.
Speaker 1:So next time you find yourself back in an old pattern the same fight with your partner, the same procrastination, the same spiral of self-doubt. Don't say ugh again. Say hmm, interesting, I wonder what's different this time. Maybe last time you froze, this time you spoke up. Maybe last time you binged Netflix to cope. This time you journaled and binged Netflix to cope, which is still growth. That's spiral thinking. It reframes relapse as revisiting with new tools. It transforms shame into curiosity and that's seeing yourself.
Speaker 1:As an ecosystem, even the parts of us that feel disruptive usually have something valuable to offer, but only if we can get curious instead of reactive. So when you check your weather, you might discover you're humid, with resentment, or sunny, fragile, or experiencing a blizzard of overwhelm. None of those are failure states. Rain isn't a moral failure. Storms aren't personal shortcomings. They're atmospheric conditions that will shift and change, because that's what weather does, especially in the Midwest, and this can be communal work. Weather feels less overwhelming when we know we're all experiencing our own conditions. So if you feel like sharing, message me, post with the hashtag innerweatherreport, or just send a scroll by carrier pigeon I want to hear you. Or just send a scroll by carrier pigeon I want to hear you.
Speaker 1:So today we canceled self-help ladders, we spiraled through raccoon brains and landed on one deceptively simple tool giving yourself a weather report. That's it. No spreadsheets, no apps. No 15-step morning routine that makes you feel like a Navy SEAL with a weather report. That's it. No spreadsheets, no apps, no 15-step morning routine that makes you feel like a Navy SEAL with a vision board, just noticing your inner weather. Because here's the truth You're not broken, you're not failing. You're just experiencing a forecast. You're just experiencing a forecast. Next time we're going to talk about your brain as a novelist Spoiler. It is not getting into the New York Times bestsellers list anytime soon. Until next time, take what you need, leave the rest and remember no-transcript.